Game Journal: Plague Inc: Evolved

Game Journal review of this week's game:

Plague Inc: Evolved

Chosen design element focus: The ability tree

Plague Inc: Evolved is a strategy based game where you the player, play as a plague type with the goal of taking over and killing everyone in the world.

Hence strategy, the fundamental core of the game is the complex ability tree that controls your plague. The particular ability tree system in Plague Inc is an interesting design element as the system is so sensitive that the outcome of your game can well depend on the sequences you select. At first, you will start with nothing plain and simple but this ability tree levels in chaos the harder the difficulty setting you to choose to play as like a real plague/disease the ability tree can "mutate" and force development of the plague which can get the player noticed and eradicated. While letting the player seemingly control the direction of infectivity which reduces the ability tree to any other- Collect, evolve, add a new action, pick the skillset you want. The fact that plague inc's ability tree can mutate by itself adds more challenge for the player which makes it an interesting system. Of course, when playing an easy level, players can choose to devolve mutations to prevent discovery, but the harder levels stop them from doing so. The players do not own the ability tree. On top of this, the visuals that the developers have chosen to display this make the system more interesting, you can gain knowledge on what abilities do to the body itself as well as view a model of the plague as it grows in seriousness and infectiousness.